Exploring talk of causality in mothers of anorexic daughters.

Abstract:

This research focused primarily on exploring the talk of mothers of daughters with
Anorexia Nervosa, paying specific attention to their emic perceptions of the underlying
causes of Anorexia Nervosa. The research sought to reveal the discourses underpinning
participants talk. Further, the way in which these discourses serve to construct Anorexia
Nervosa in particular ways as well as the function these discourses serve were explored.
This study is qualitative and exploratory in design and provides a unique understanding
of Anorexia Nervosa in the form of emic accounts gleaned from mothers' own
experiences. The findings of this research suggest that mothers of daughters with
Anorexia Nervosa primarily reproduce a discourse on the causality of Anorexia Nervosa
that is family or biomedically focused. Through analysis of the discourses embedded in
participants’ talk, it became evident that participants reproduce discourses of gender and
femininity and are influenced by societal pressure as well as the constructions of
womanhood and motherhood. Insight into a side of the mother of the Anorectic, often
concealed in the literature, was revealed through a semi-structured interview process with
nine urban, middle-class, white South African mothers of daughters with Anorexia
Nervosa. Interviews were then transcribed and analysed according to Braun and Clarke's
thematic analysis. Incorporating the silenced voices of mothers of daughters with
Anorexia Nervosa appears to have allowed for the emergence of a more generous view of
the mother and has contributed to a larger set of discursive repertoires through which to
understand Anorexia Nervosa. This research further gave rise to the realisation of a need
for a critical education program whereby taken for granted notions can be revealed and
actively engaged. This program would ideally seek to free the anorexic woman as well as
the mother from the constraints of the uncritically constructed conceptualisations of
Anorexia Nervosa and femininity.